


dilly-dallying

by slytherpvff



Category: Barry (TV 2018)
Genre: (Fuches and Albert are only mentioned), Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, Daemon Feels, Early in Canon, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Moral Dilemmas, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 02:27:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29342808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slytherpvff/pseuds/slytherpvff
Summary: Barry and his kinkajou daemon, Marilyn, are waiting in Sioux Falls before they finish their most recently-assigned hit. This isn't for any particular reason.This isn't for any particular reason.Daemon/HDM AU.
Kudos: 2





	dilly-dallying

His gaze keeps shifting because her fur won’t stop catching the low light of the hotel room. Even when he has on only the TV and the light just inside the door, she shimmers distant reds and purples and greens.

“You’re distracting me,” Barry murmurs, sitting up just enough to free his hand from the weight of the duvet, massaging at his tired eyes.

His daemon stops fiddling with the paper coffee cups wrapped in their thin, plastic body bags beside the TV, turns her striking round eyes on him. Such a dull brown in the sun but practically an abyss in the dark.

“Good,” she cuts back. She settles back on her haunches to rub her tiny paws across her protruding ears. The shining, shining shimmer every time she moves a muscle. “We aren’t supposed to be on _vacation,_ Barry.”

“Well, why not?” He sits up, then, fed up with pretending they could just have a quiet night in. “Parsons isn’t due to leave town until _Sunday._ What’s wrong with waiting just a couple of days before we do the assignment?”

She _sighs_ like she’s trying to not outright hiss at him, low and sultry and very Marilyn of her.

“I don’t want to take a break in a hotel we’re doing an assignment in.” She turns and hops up onto the table to the right of the TV stand, her prehensile tail looping around the lip of it before it finds the handle of the coffee pot and settles over that instead.

“You said you were okay with it in Tucson.”

Marilyn twitches, her paw reaching over to scratch an itch Barry couldn’t tell if she really had or not. He scratches at his wrist in turn, just beneath Albert’s KIA bracelet. Albert’s bracelet. Albert—

“I wasn’t okay with it. I was lying to you, then.” Marilyn leans to one side to look into the bathroom for no reason, and now the pull is starting to sting a bit. Barry pinches his eyes shut and endures it. It’s fine. She won't keep doing it forever.

Tail flicking over the handle of the coffee pot like an irritated cat, Marilyn straightens back out. Barry blows the tension out from his chest over the noise of the Home & Garden Television Channel.

“I’m sorry,” she tells him. She’s being more mindful, now, of both of them. He can feel that. He knows she gets like this sometimes. They both do.

Ever since they got back, they just… Sometimes they stop paying attention to each other the way they’re supposed to. It was _unnatural,_ but it was starting to feel more and more natural for them.

Which was not comforting.

“It’s okay,” Barry still says. Marilyn leaps from the table onto the bed, her front and back paws gripping at the cloth runner meant to keep the stains from his shoes off the sheets. She’s up beneath his hand before he can say anything else, and the comfort is twofold. Immediate. Warm. Barry edges back down under the blankets, still in his day clothes. He’d remembered to bring pajamas this time, but it was starting to look like he wouldn’t be using them.

His hand smooths across the soft, thick fur over her back. Brown, honey-colored, tinged with that ever-shifting rainbow that daemons get from...wherever they get it from. The life coursing across the outer edges of her. Proof that they are.

“You’re thinking so loud,” she murmurs. Barry breathes again, because he felt like he hadn’t been.

“You really don’t want to stay here? Even for just a day?”

She stands herself up and Barry lets her, watching her tail curl around her front, her narrow muzzle and her big, round eyes staring up at him.

“I just want to be done with this, Barry. I just want to get it _done._ ”

He knows that the “for good” is implied. He wants that, too. It weighs on him sometimes, surely she can _feel_ that. He’s thought about asking Fuches when he thinks the last assignment will be, the last hit, what _endgame_ he’s imagining for all of them. But he chickenshits out every time, because it’s still a job. It’s what Fuches gave them in return for clearing their paperwork, for getting them discharged so cleanly and vouching for them without a second thought. They’re _lucky_ to be doing this right now.

And he’s good at it. Efficient. Kind, as anybody can be with it.

Barry’s chest burns.

“The longer we take with each hit,” he says, his hand stilling over her long tail, trying to not let his head drift off into the ceiling the way it did sometimes when it was dark, “the more space there is in between.”

She contemplates that. Her paws move up to her mouth, licking across her tiny knuckles to clean over her ears again. Barry’s hand finds her back and she leans into him, and she curls up as small as she can go just beneath his chin, atop his chest.

“You’re right,” she says quietly. “I’m—”

“Hey... You don’t have to be sorry. Okay?”

She doesn’t answer. Barry cradles her a bit closer in response. His nose starts to feel wet on the inside.

The happy family who are so, so excited to see their newly refurbished house swim in front of his eyes, and Barry can tell from Marilyn’s trembling that tonight is going to be rough.

**Author's Note:**

> If folks like this I might write other scenes from the show with daemons mixed in.  
> Comments or Kudos appreciated if you finished. Thank you for reading, stay safe!


End file.
